The Horrendous Visa Program Forcing Tech Workers to ‘Dig Their Own Graves’
Leo Perrero still remembers the humiliation of losing his job.
“All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days,” he was told, later recalling the experience before Congress.
“Later that same day,” he added, “I remember very clearly going to the local church pumpkin sale and having to tell the kids that we could not buy any because my job was going over to a foreign worker.”
Disney replaced Perrero using a little-known and oft overlooked provision of immigration law that allows big tech companies to replace their employees with foreign workers under extremely questionable circumstances.
In an upcoming episode of “Michelle Malkin Investigates” — “H-1B Hell: The Sellout of America’s Best and Brightest Workers” — Malkin delves into how the H-1B worker visa program has been putting people like Leo Perrero and countless others out of work since 1990.
On location at UC San Francisco, where 79 IT workers recently lost their jobs to an outsourcing firm and user of H-1B visa workers, Malkin spoke to some of tech workers laid off by the university.
“I was shocked Monday when I showed up at work and my boss was standing there with a letter,” said Greg Lennon, one such former UCSF employee.
“Every single one of my evaluations for 15 years said ‘meets and exceeds expectations,’ and that was from three different managers,” Lennon said. “I was working between 60 and 70 hours per week.”
Even worse, the employees were told to “dig their own graves” as it were, being forced to train their foreign replacements in exchange for their severance pay.
“It’s kind of insulting,” said one of Lennon’s co-workers – a married father of two – when asked about the situation. “[It’s] a slap in the face.”
Such experiences are, unfortunately, not uncommon. Over the past few years alone, similar stories have emerged elsewhere in the tech sector, most notably from Disney and Microsoft.
“The H-1B program essentially handed the keys to our immigration system to corporations with a lot of influence and with ulterior motives,” Conservative Review Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz tells MMI. “Their motive is to bring in as many cheap workers as possible, which is understandable; you always want to cut costs.” But the unintended consequences are far-reaching, he added.
“Why should IBM or Disney be deciding our future voting population?” Horowitz asks. “That needs to be decided by our general immigration system, not those looking to save $15,000 or $20,000 on their labor costs.” (For more from the author of “The Horrendous Visa Program Forcing Tech Workers to ‘Dig Their Own Graves'” please click HERE)
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